Film Review – The Birthday Cake

“The Birthday Cake” is a story about the Italian mafia in a day and age when tales of old-world criminal endeavors have been exhausted, with enough of these productions all following the same story of paranoia and “fuhgeddaboudit” family ties. The writing (credited to Diomedes Raul Bermudez, Shiloh Fernandez, and Jimmy Giannopoulous, who also directs) doesn’t aim especially high, supplying a tale of danger involving one young man’s dangerous night on the town as he makes his way to a celebration, and casting is both oddball and dispiritingly predictable. It takes a lot of patience to stick with “The Birthday Cake” as it deals with angry encounters with loud people, but it helps to have the knowledge that the material is going somewhere, offering a payoff that’s way more interesting than the picture’s laborious introductions. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com